Welcome to Gaia! ::

... Well, honestly, when you're learning Norwegian, learning to speak Bokmål is.. What should I say..? A very bad idea!

First of all, you'll have no chance what so ever to understand people living outside Oslo, and secondly, no one speaks bokmål.
What people reffer to as 'speaking bokmål' is speaking the dialect around the Oslo area.

I would reccomend people to learn how to write it, since it's used a lot more than Nynorsk, but still.
Learn to speak a dialect and how to write bokmål, that's a good mix.
At least, that's hoe the exchange students coming to Norway do it.

Såvidt jeg vet kaller vi 'ygdrissel' for 'yggdrasil' i dag.

Also, it's wise to give the difference between 'Du/Deg' so that people don't say things like
'hvem tror deg at deg er?" or "Jeg elsker du"


På er ikke en oversettelse til The.
På er On
"It's ON THE table"

"Den er PÅ bordET"

"Katte" is not the correct form of 'cat'. 'Katte' is a dialect word.
In Bokmål, Cat is 'Katt'.

And we call the Constitution 'Grunnlov'. Konstutisjon is never used with the 17th of may.

So is she. Velkommen tebake! Kossn går det me deg då?

Hi everybody,

I'm just getting into Norwegian, and I couldn't help but notice that there seems to be a bit of (albeit polite) conflict over various phrases and dialects in Norwegian. Mostly this has to do with Nynorsk versus Bokmål, but there also appear to be regional issues.

So, I propose a few measures to make sure we're not treading on one another's toes:

When you are posting advice/lessons for Norwegian, please specify whether you are teaching Nynorsk or Bokmål, and what dialect you are speaking (if applicable).
This will help prevent misunderstandings of people trying to correct others on their 'errors' when really it is only a regional difference, etc. Also please specify if any contractions or abbreviations are part of slang, and if possible provide the most commonly used version.

Native speakers have right of way.
Not all people are born to be teachers, and not all native speakers will speak exactly the same - it's difficult to find a balance between two languages when they do not translate -exactly-. But in all cases, we can safely assume that native speakers will have the most trustworthy knowledge of how the language should be used. I cannot stress this enough: If you are not a native speaker and are learning the language, no matter how far advanced you may be, please show respect for the teacher before you go 'correcting' them. If your knowledge is based on textbooks or the Internet, there is still a fairly good chance that it is a dialect that is different from the native speaker's, or is possibly incorrect. If you believe they have taught something incorrectly, say that your textbook puts it differently - not just that they're WRONG.

Do not steal somebody else's thunder.
If you have read the stickies for this forum, you will know that you are not allowed to start a thread teaching a language if there already is one for that language, unless the previous thread has been long since abandoned. Please respect the rules - creating a new thread smacks very strongly of "Well his/her teaching sucks, so come hang out with me instead", and is both immature and rude.

I don't wish to be such a grouch about it, but there have been a few unnecessary misunderstandings about this. I will be posting this on the relevant threads.